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When I was little, I remember a trip to the beach my family was on in which I fell off of a dock and nearly drowned. Something was caught on my foot and no matter how I kicked and struggled, I couldn't get free. Fortunately, someone jumped in and rescued me (not a family member. Funny, that.)

Afterward, I had a very strong fear of being in deep, dark water where I couldn't see the bottom or what might snag my leg. I'm better with it now and I love to go swimming, but I recall the dread I'd feel when faced with that situation

What fears do/did you have?

My fear is reading a thread title with the improper use of your. Truly horrifying.

But seriously something similar happened to me. I was using a boogie board out on some small waves when I was younger, and one large wave came out of nowhere. I was dragged under in a riptide and completely lost my sense of direction, having no idea which way was up or down while I was pulled away from shore. I managed to get to the surface and back to land, but I've never really liked going out into the water since.

I blame autocorrect.

I had a debilitating fear that my mom was going to die or leave me. I had a few reasons for the fear but mostly it was just extreme anxiety.

I am also arachnophobic and always have been. Fucking spidery bastards.

I've had a fear of lightning since childhood.

Also, as a kid, I had a recurring nightmare of a witch-like woman who could create purple strings with her hands, which she'd use to ensnare you. Fortunately, those nightmares have ceased.

Amputees.

This girl in my neighborhood was a few years older than me used to pin me down and poke me with her nub. Ever since then...

I also had a near drowning experience as a kid. As a result, I also have that fear of large bodies of water. I could never shake it. I know how to swim, but I still get anxious and have a hard time doing it.

I also had the large body of water/dark water fear - and I didn't even have to nearly drown to pick it up. Of course it was mostly cured when I swam across a river in a fit of stupidity one afternoon, but only mostly.

Getting lost and being unable to find my way back. I grew up in a pretty safe suburb when I was little, and my parents let me play in the yard frequently. One day I decided to go down the road, and find out what was down there. I got turned around and couldn't find my way back.

I was only gone for maybe 20 minutes before my parents found me. I wasn't even that far away, but to a little kid it seemed pretty scary.

I used to have recurring nightmares in which I was falling sideways along the road and unable to control where I was going, just kinda fall/flying out of control, further and further away.

Cobras. Maybe blame it on GI Joe cartoons. I was freaking terrified that cobras would somehow get under my bed and bite me.

Rotting corpses or skeletons. It took me a really, really long time to get over my overpowering fear of the sight of a corpse in any state of decomposition. This lasted well into my teenage years. It made movies like Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Batman, etc. hard to watch for me or I had to cover my eyes at those parts. It was so bad that my dad had a science magazine with a picture of the Iceman on the cover and I couldn't look at it.



This picture would have immobilized me with terror.

What if you went a museum with exhibits that showed real mummies? Nightmare scenario for you?

I ask because I remember going to the British Museum, in London, and looking at their mummies, and being slightly unnerved that I was looking at a 2000-year-old dead guy.

Spoilered because I'm not a total douchebag, but still enough of one to know you'll look anyway...

Chucky from Child's Play. Mostly because I had a doll that looked a lot like it. My mom wouldn't let us throw it out because she kept insisting I'd grow out of it. By the time I did (when I finally watched Child's Play) I was 10 years old and too older for the damn thing.

makare said:

I am also arachnophobic and always have been. Fucking spidery bastards.

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funny thing about that... I was reading a paper on that in which it was laid out like this. people laugh when we are afraid of little spiders, we scream and run, we are naturally wired to be afraid of them. why is that? because at some point in the far past there was something that looked or moved like a spider that if it got to us would kill us in a instant. This means for practical purposes that when it was warmer on this planet, much warmer, there was a LARGE creature that was spider like that would attack us. now we know that largest size that an arthropods body can support on our planet is about 1-1.5 feet in dimension.(don't count the giant deep water arthropods, thats a little different since they have gills. the limiting factor is their cardiovascular system. land arthropods don't have lungs, they have air-holes to exchange gas all over their bodies) in very warm parts of the world(Australia, South America) there are spiders of this size. Basically, the planet has been MUCH COOLER with the ice ages and the insects have been much smaller for most of our modern existence on this planet, but we are getting warmer, and if we keep getting warmer we may see those giant eight legged freaks again!

Bowielee said:

Spoilered because I'm not a total douchebag, but still enough of one to know you'll look anyway...

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I like how you made my purple lightning, effectively combining the two things I posted about. That was a nice touch.

Jellyfish and deep, dark water, both of which only manifested themselves during the Boy Scouts' annual trip to the archipelago. Our local troop had its own motor boat, and every group would get a few days of sailing done every summer. It was nice, but I couldn't bring myself to swim if I couldn't see the bottom. And after one year when we saw a lot of jellyfish swimming about the boat my refusal to get into water grew that much stronger.

I guess mine would be needles. A hurtful visit to the doctor's to get my vaccinations, and I was afraid of the things for a good long while. They're long, they're sharp, and people want to stick them into your flesh. Ugh! And what was worse to a young child, my parents were just sitting there, letting that dude hurt me and not doing a thing to prevent it! One of the most embarrassing memories from my childhood is of me and two of my classmates in elementary school going to the nurse's office to get a vaccination for something. I kind of lost it there, and broke down.

I've long since grown out of that fear, but I remember being truly terrified of needles.

Drowning. I refused to learn how to swim until I was basically an adult. Still hate it when I can't touch the bottom of a pool, and I never venture out further than necessary at the ocean or a lake. Unless I'm on a boat, of course.

These fucking things.... It was a Kleenex dispenser. My Grandmother had one of these in nearly every room of the house. If you had the sniffles, she was sure to put one on the nightstand near your head. Nothing like having a victim of a decapitation sitting on the freaking end table smiling sweetly at you in her death....

Also the in the converted garage there was a picture of her Great-Grandfather with his two brothers, they looked like Civil War Veterans, that had their picture taken when they were in their 70's. They were just some really hard, haggard looking men. The picture was lit throughout the night from the street lamp. So it was basically the only thing you could see in that large room, was these stern men and a baby's head....

When I was child I fell in gravel somewhere and scraped my knee. I also got the gravel stuck in would so my mom had to tweeze the teensy rocks out.

After that the night mare started and has persisted into my adult years. In it I am just hanging out somewhere, like my back yard, when my hands begins to get itchy. I scratch the back of it and it feels...wrong. Lumpy. Hard.

Sometimes, around this point, I realize I'm having that nightmare again and I try to ignore the feeling...however it goes beyond itchy. It burns and pricks. I NEED to touch it, to relieve it. So I scratch and the flesh tears away. Sometimes I sob like a little kid, other times I'm trying to convince myself to just stop.

There's no blood, just flaking flesh, as if I'm made of dried leaves. Then I see it. A twisted, black pine cone looking thing is in my hand...and it's taking root.

I always wake up around this time. I don't see what the roots do.

My husband loves making fun of this nightmare because it is silly.

Being the victim of some random, violent crime. My mom would always tell me, "I don't want to make you paranoid, but..." and then tell me all about the terrible things that can happen to you if you're not constantly aware. So, to this day, I have vivid dreams about being shot, stabbed, and raped. Not fun. I should really take some kind of self defense course.

The room I slept in growing up is the same room that my grandma died in... still scares me to think about it and I swear I heard shit all the time in there

Aww, guys, I want to cuddle you all!

I'm on the 'afraid of spiders' train. I'm getting much better about it - I can now kill them on my own. But I can't help but whine and cry about it. I remember when I was little my friend and I had a sleepover and didn't want to sleep. So, we were playing 'detectives' and went wandering around the basement. We were looking for just a bunch of random things and saw a white lint looking thing on the ground. Army crawling over to it, we shove our faces super close to it, which I'm pretty sure we were maybe2-3 inches away from it. Then it sprouts its legs and starts running. I'm pretty sure it was a spider and remembering that just gives me the heebeejeebeez.

Like I said, I am getting better about that, but now I'm also quite afraid of the thought of being stuck in a room and having it fill with water. I'm a good swimmer, I love to swim, but that thought....just...no. I have near panic attacks when I watch scences like that in movies. (Thank you The Guardian..)

Spiders, dogs, wide open spaces, crowds, the crushing ennui of middle-class mediocrity.

I still have an abnormal fear of clowns.

A few years ago, I was at a Habs summit (basically another forum I post in have a gathering of Hab fans meeting up and spending a day together, tours, breakfast, drinks, dinner, hockey game, charity events etc...).... and as we left the breakfast place I suddenly got accosted by 3 clowns on the sidewalk. One comes up to my face and gives me a hard time for wearing the Habs jersey and goes, "You're wearing that toilet seat the wrong way" (the C logo).

I just froze there for a few seconds in fear of these clowns.

I was at a friend's kid birthday party last year. Suddenly this really fat clown comes in and starts to play gags on people. I had to GTFO of there.

Gusto said:

Spiders, dogs, wide open spaces, crowds, the crushing ennui of middle-class mediocrity.

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Quick, someone play The Shins!

Sorry. I know what you mean, honestly. Though I don't have a problem with dogs until they bite.

I am also afraid of deep water.

Centipedes, especially these bastards.

Look at those soulless eyes. You know it's waiting for me to sleep so it can use those thousands of little legs to burrow into my brain and start commanding me.
Gah!

Emrys Holy fuck that is upsettingly gross.

Chad Sexington said:

Emrys Holy fuck that is upsettingly gross.

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I know! And I use to live in the deep South with all manner of snakes, spiders, alligators and other nasty creatures. They didn't bother me a bit, though I didn't go out of my way to play with them. I move to Kingston, ON and find a 4" house centipede undulating over my floor one night, ululating and waving little scimitars around. And when I tried to catch it, did it run away like a normal insect? Oh no, this thing rushed me! I've hated the little buggers ever since.

Emrys said:

Centipedes, especially these bastards.
Look at those soulless eyes. You know it's waiting for me to sleep so it can use those thousands of little legs to burrow into my brain and start commanding me.
Gah!

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Google : desert spiders .... I dare you.

Aren't some centipedes poisonous?

Anything worm...ish... bothers me. Centipedes, millipedes, caterpillars... even things like snakes. Something about the way they move causes this extreme distress in the core of my being. It's totally irrational.

Quotemander Prime said:

Aren't some centipedes poisonous?

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Yeah, but these aren't. They're actually beneficial and eat stuff like silverfish and other bugs in your house.
Doesn't make me any kinder to them.

Jay said:

Google : desert spiders .... I dare you.

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Those don't cause near the heart palpitations of house centipedes.
Of course, if one was on me, I would still be doing the icky dance to try to get it off.

My general rule is that anything with more than 4 legs can go fuck itself.

Bones said:

funny thing about that... I was reading a paper on that in which it was laid out like this. people laugh when we are afraid of little spiders, we scream and run, we are naturally wired to be afraid of them. why is that? because at some point in the far past there was something that looked or moved like a spider that if it got to us would kill us in a instant. This means for practical purposes that when it was warmer on this planet, much warmer, there was a LARGE creature that was spider like that would attack us. now we know that largest size that an arthropods body can support on our planet is about 1-1.5 feet in dimension.(don't count the giant deep water arthropods, thats a little different since they have gills. the limiting factor is their cardiovascular system. land arthropods don't have lungs, they have air-holes to exchange gas all over their bodies) in very warm parts of the world(Australia, South America) there are spiders of this size. Basically, the planet has been MUCH COOLER with the ice ages and the insects have been much smaller for most of our modern existence on this planet, but we are getting warmer, and if we keep getting warmer we may see those giant eight legged freaks again!

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If that day comes that will also mark the day I buy a gun.

Tress said:

My general rule is that anything with more than 4 legs can go fuck itself.

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With that avatar...

Cartoon version of a face hugger smoking a cigarette? Funny.

If face huggers were real? Fucking terrifying.

North_Ranger said:

Jellyfish and deep, dark water, both of which only manifested themselves during the Boy Scouts' annual trip to the archipelago. Our local troop had its own motor boat, and every group would get a few days of sailing done every summer. It was nice, but I couldn't bring myself to swim if I couldn't see the bottom. And after one year when we saw a lot of jellyfish swimming about the boat my refusal to get into water grew that much stronger.

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Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

I have several things that frighten me (heights for example) none of them are a big enough to really mess with me to much. Although I will say my biggest fear that has no real founding but still the thought of it terrifies me is the thought of one day losing my mind. I have no real reason to even consider the possibility of that happening but of all my fears I would say that is my biggest and most unnecessary fear.

LittleSin said:

When I was child I fell in gravel somewhere and scraped my knee. I also got the gravel stuck in would so my mom had to tweeze the teensy rocks out.

After that the night mare started and has persisted into my adult years. In it I am just hanging out somewhere, like my back yard, when my hands begins to get itchy. I scratch the back of it and it feels...wrong. Lumpy. Hard.

Sometimes, around this point, I realize I'm having that nightmare again and I try to ignore the feeling...however it goes beyond itchy. It burns and pricks. I NEED to touch it, to relieve it. So I scratch and the flesh tears away. Sometimes I sob like a little kid, other times I'm trying to convince myself to just stop.

There's no blood, just flaking flesh, as if I'm made of dried leaves. Then I see it. A twisted, black pine cone looking thing is in my hand...and it's taking root.

I always wake up around this time. I don't see what the roots do.

My husband loves making fun of this nightmare because it is silly.

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For the record, that's not silly.

That's HORRIFYING.

Tress said:

Cartoon version of a face hugger smoking a cigarette? Funny.

If face huggers were real? Fucking terrifying.

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I used to have nightmares about the facehuggers when I was a kid.

LittleSin said:

When I was child I fell in gravel somewhere and scraped my knee. I also got the gravel stuck in would so my mom had to tweeze the teensy rocks out.

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When I was 13, I turfed it riding my bike and cut my hand open. There was a pebble inside the gash, under the flap of skin. I still have the scar from the stitches.

I initially thought it was a situation very similar to Sera's, when I was young I almost drowned in a public pool. I still remember the time and being pulled out of the water by my mother's friend. The more I thought about it, though, the event was somewhat peaceful and serene and I still remember how calm I felt.

Then it dawned on me the worst was waking up at night to the shadows on the wall or imagining something floating over me, terrifying me so badly I couldn't breathe. The panic was intense and the worst part was I couldn't move due to the fear. From the age of about 4 through 11 I would often wake up terrified and unable to move, sure something/someone was going to frighten me to death.

That was the worst.

Sleeping with my face to the wall....


Yeah, when i had my first nightmare (likely 1st i remember) i woke up with my face to the wall, for years since i couldn't fall asleep with my face to the wall...

Heh, i still remember that nightmare... i was being bathed by the 3 little pigs in a small bathroom, and the big bad wolf was outside, in the giant hallway with a million doors, and we had to run from the bathroom to somewhere else... then i woke up... i blame it on watching too many cartoons...

Also, running in dreams is next to impossible... which really sucked when the bad robot from Robocop came after me that one time... weirdly the giant ants from the same dream didn't require running from...

Null said:

When I was 13, I turfed it riding my bike and cut my hand open. There was a pebble inside the gash, under the flap of skin. I still have the scar from the stitches.

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I once fell on the wayside from the bike and slid on cement with my thigh... my whole leg was all scabbed over with a pattern that i found kinda cool...

Also one while playing hide and seek i tried jumping over a rose bush... my lower legs went through the bush, and the person got to home before me. Fun times...

I think this should do for now, thanks everyone.

We'll be seeing you soon.

Do feel free to continue though.

I still vividly remember the most terrifying dream I ever had.

My sister was still a baby at the time. In the dream, I was in the white tiled room. There was nothing in the room except this tub that looked like it grew out of the floor. It was made out of the same white tiling and was square in shape. When I went up and looked inside the tub, my sister was in the tub full of water and was drowning. I tried to get her out, but the surface of the water was completely solid. As she was drowning, I remember that the soft spot on her head was throbbing.... I woke up sweating and crying.

It was just horrible.

Bowie... *hug*

A complete lack of entertainment filter by my parents combined with my dad's love of "real-life" unexplained tv shows like In Search Of... and whatnot led to a brutal fear of ghosts. One of my only childhood memories is of a terrific nightmare based on a Real People segment of a mummified native american ghost in my house and my parents just standing there all matter-of-fact while it chased me through the house.

I don't even believe in ghosts anymore, but I can still get my wiggums on with a good ghost story.

SeraRelm said:

I think this should do for now, thanks everyone.

We'll be seeing you soon.

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You... you fiend!

SeraRelm said:

I think this should do for now, thanks everyone.

We'll be seeing you soon.

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Clever.

The dark. I used to be so completely terrified of the dark that it was all I could do not to break in terror.

My subconscious would delight/delights in sending me through tight, confined spaces where I can't breath in my nightmares. Other times, xenomorphs feature in my own personal Alien movie.

Which brings me to the current champion uber alles, for all time: arachnophobia.

I'm not sure if I've told this story here or not... I did my walking beat in Central Precinct, a place of mostly well-organized streets laid out in grids, with "lanes" (for some reason, Savannah doesn't have alleys) passing through the middle of the blocks, running East-West. Whilst walking through one of these lanes at night, looking for whatever trouble we rookies could get ourselves into, I turned my head to my partner, cracked a joke, then turned and saw something like this guy right in front of my face:



I did some straight Matrix-style web-dodging shit, limboed underneath the web that SPANNED THE LANE, then quick-stepped out of there, baton sweeping in front of me to clear any other webs out of the way.

You wanna see me scream like a little girl, high-stepping and flailing arms? Put a spider on me somewhere.

Oh man, I forgot my fear of the dark. It's not so much the dark itself, or more specifically, it's not so much the lack of light, or my inability to see well; it's the thought of all of the things that prefer to hunt at night, and the fact that I wouldn't be able to see any of them until it was far too late for me to do anything about it.

I was really afraid of the dark until about 3 years ago. That was when Jet was born and i had to start getting up with him during the night. I didn't want to wake him up with lights...so I learned to see in the dark.

Now I find a peace in the blackness.

Oh, I have no issue with darkness if I'm inside, or even if I'm outside, but within 10 - 15 feet of my house; and strangely, if I'm in the complete middle of nowhere, in the mountains where some of those predators actually live I have no problem. My biggest issue seems go come in rural farmland areas. Makes no damn sense to me at all. I love the night sky, out in the country where you can actually see stars instead of just light pollution from the nearest city, and I love the lack of man-made sounds and the proliferation of natural sounds, like crickets, or cicadas, or frogs, or whatever is native to the area; but rural farmland, or even lightly wooded acreage, and I'm a complete coward, jumping at every sound bigger than a bullfrog.

Gared said:

Oh, I have no issue with darkness if I'm inside, or even if I'm outside, but within 10 - 15 feet of my house; and strangely, if I'm in the complete middle of nowhere, in the mountains where some of those predators actually live I have no problem. My biggest issue seems go come in rural farmland areas. Makes no damn sense to me at all. I love the night sky, out in the country where you can actually see stars instead of just light pollution from the nearest city, and I love the lack of man-made sounds and the proliferation of natural sounds, like crickets, or cicadas, or frogs, or whatever is native to the area; but rural farmland, or even lightly wooded acreage, and I'm a complete coward, jumping at every sound bigger than a bullfrog.

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Because that's how the Predator gets you.

The Predator has a cloaking device. He doesn't actually need darkness.

"Turn around, turn around."

What do you drive, what are your fears, what are your health problems.... we are really making it easy for Team ShegoRelm

Well, it IS an election year...

fade said:

What do you drive, what are your fears, what are your health problems.... we are really making it easy for Team ShegoRelm

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I get a feeling that encounter would be more comical than scary.

When a bunch of amputees show up at my door, I'll take comfort in knowing that they're all unarmed.

BananaHands said:

When a bunch of amputees show up at my door, I'll take comfort in knowing that they're all unarmed.

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Oh really

fade said:

What do you drive, what are your fears, what are your health problems.... we are really making it easy for Team ShegoRelm

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Hey, if they can get 3 talking pigs and a Big Bad Wolf (not a regular one girls, that's just a mean dog, plenty of those around here) i won't even mind being tortured to death...

Quotemander Prime said:

Aren't some centipedes poisonous?

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They're ALL poisonous.

Dunno. House centipedes have enough legs that it's like they've crossed right over into 'fuzzy.'

I had a longtime fear of the blood lancet. Even as a 10yr-old, when doing the annual finger prick, they would have to bring in another adult or two to hold me down to give me that poke. Later on in middle school science class, I got to stick myself for a blood-typing lab. It was a cakewalk. Ever since then, no problems whatsoever.

--Patrick

Bridges. Still afraid of them.

HCGLNS said:

Bridges. Still afraid of them.

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Thank GOD nobody took that amazing Vonnegut quote and turned it into a demotivational poster yet.

BananaHands said:

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John Krasinski scares the shit out of me too, B.

Gusto said:

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ElJuski said:

Thank GOD nobody took that amazing Vonnegut quote and turned it into a demotivational poster yet.

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